The Siren Skylark

Sixteen-year-old Frankie walked along the makeshift road under the intense heat of brilliant sunshine. He proceeded beneath the cloudless sky with little enthusiasm as dry, cracked boots clumped against dry, cracked earth. A dumper truck overtook him, coughing out a cloud of black diesel smoke that failed to disperse in the windless air. As he walked through the cloud, Frankie wafted it away with a wave of his arm that revealed a damp sweat patch under the sleeve of his grey T-shirt.

The noise of the dumper faded and was replaced by the song of a skylark; a sound far more familiar to Frankie's ears. He left the road and made across a stretch of wasteland towards a row of newly built houses, some with scaffolding around them. The going wasn't easy, that terrain being gouged with deep, tyre-tread patterned ruts that served as reminders of wetter days. Occasional clumps of grass stood parched and still, dying in the sun.

Frankie reached the end of the block of new dwellings and climbed a ladder. On the scaffold at the rear, he immediately found the object of his quest; a battered old paint tin containing watery red ochre dye and a line of string wrapped around a stick, the wherewithal for marking lines onto roofing felt to indicate where battens should be nailed. He picked up the tin by the rim and stared at the contents, swirling the liquid around, and then spitting into it with a curse.

After only a few steps of his return journey, Frankie stopped and sat down on the scaffold, dangling his legs over the edge. From his pocket, he took a cigarette packet and a box of matches. He pushed the tray open to reveal only one cigarette inside, which he pulled out and put to his lips. He struck a match and lit up, cupping the flame in his hands through habit, although there wasn't a breath of wind. He inhaled deeply and flicked the match away.

The movement of several lapwings in a field beyond caught his eye. He watched them wheel and swoop for a few minutes until his interest waned, then, having no further use for them, he took the three remaining matches and struck them together. He held on to them until they burned his fingertips, and then he put the empty box to his mouth and blew the tray into the air.

Frankie knew that he should be getting back but allowed himself a little more time. He grabbed the safety rail above his head and stared into the distance, where he spotted three boys walking across a field. The tallest boy carried something long and thin and Frankie wondered if they were going fishing or shooting, or maybe it was just a stick and they were out for whatever adventure came their way. A wave of misery came over him as he longed to be with them. He had left school at Easter and took a job as a labourer with a roofing firm, but his eagerness to appear grown-up had evaporated after just one day of hard physical toil. Now the schools were out for their long summer break, and here he was sweating in the sun.

He began to daydream about his own fishing expeditions during the summer holidays, but he had barely baited his hook before he was interrupted by the sound of footsteps on the scaffold. He turned and jumped with fright as he saw the broad figure of Greg standing by the gable end of the house, hands on hips and a stern look on his face. "If you're going to hold the job up, you can piss off home," he said. Frankie got to his feet, picked up the tin, and scurried along the scaffold. "Get over there, you idle bastard," Greg said, aiming a kick, but missing.

Spud was in his late thirties, unshaven and overweight, and today he sported the seemingly contradictory outfit of a vest and woolly hat, the latter being worn to protect his bald head from the sun. He leaned on the scaffold finishing a cigarette and, on seeing the approach of the other two, flicked the cigarette end in the direction of Frankie. "Ah," Spud said, "the wanderer returns."

"Caught the lazy bastard sunbathing on the back scaffold," Greg said. Frankie walked towards the foot of the ladder and began climbing with the tin of red ochre in his hand, but he had only gone up a few rungs when Greg ordered him to stop. He came back down and Greg took the tin from him. "I'll take that," he said. "You get them battens up." Frankie looked in dismay at the bundles of twelve-foot-long battens that lay on the roadside. There wasn't anything about the job that he liked, save for the drive home, but he hated carrying battens up the ladder more than any other task. 

With clinging fingers he took one end of the bundle and lifted it onto his right shoulder. He balanced the bundle and made his way slowly up the ladder, but, to lift the battens past a vertical scaffold pole, he had to lean back and allow the rear end to drop. As he clung tightly to a rung with his free hand, Frankie realised that he had leaned back too far and the weight of the rear end began to pull him away from the ladder, leaving him no choice but to let the bundle fall to the ground.

The impact caused the straps holding the bundle together to snap, and the tightly packed contents fell into a heap that resembled a giant game of jackstraws. The noise alerted the two men on the roof, who stopped working to investigate the commotion. On seeing the scattered battens and their bemused labourer, who had scurried down the ladder after letting go of the bundle, they offered opinions on the boy's performance. Their comments consisted of a series of swear words, separated by adjectives like useless and pathetic. After apparently exhausting his profanity vocabulary, Spud ordered Frankie to hand the battens up to him, two at a time. Frankie set about this task with some satisfaction, wishing he could have adopted this method from the start.

With the battens safely on the scaffold, Frankie climbed the ladder and leaned on the eave to take a breather. Greg and Spud had marked off part of the roof using the red ochre line and Spud approached Frankie, winding the string back around its stick.

"Tin," he said in his usual terse manner. Frankie picked up the battered tin and offered it to Spud, who took it from him and dropped the line inside. "You know what happens when you spend too much time sunning yourself," he said. Frankie was completely bemused by this statement and could offer no reply. "You get sunburned," Spud said, suddenly dipping his right hand into the tin and smearing the watery red dye onto Frankie's face, causing him to scrape the inside of his top lip on a tooth. Frankie recoiled, rubbing his eyes with the front of his T-shirt then dabbing his lip with his fingertips and checking for blood. He blinked his eyes repeatedly until he could see clearly again, and all the while Spud and Greg laughed. 

Frankie failed to hold back a sob, so he turned away, pretending to wipe dye from his eyes with his T-shirt, but Spud bellowed for battens and Frankie went meekly back to work. He handed Spud four battens, and the two roofers set about nailing them down. Both men hammered in each nail with an almost identical beat; two taps for the nail to bite followed by three solid blows to hammer it home. After several minutes of activity, during which time Frankie unwrapped a roll of roofing felt in readiness for the next stage, the hammering suddenly stopped. Spud straightened up and looking to his left and pointing with the shaft of his hatchet, shouted, "Tiles ahoy!"

As soon as these words left Spud's lips, a loud spit of hydraulic brakes came from the direction of the site entrance. Frankie looked at the lorry and his heart sank; he knew that there were two thousand tiles on the back of it. "Go on, then, get cracking," Spud said, and as the hammering resumed, an utterly miserable Frankie made his way down the ladder.

"About here if you can," Frankie said, looking up to the lorry driver while gesturing with his left arm. "Close to the ladder, see." The driver nodded and drove the lorry into position. When he turned off the engine, the resulting silence was broken by the song of the skylark, and Frankie wished more than ever to be with those three boys. As the driver undid the ropes that held the tiles secure he made light-hearted jibes about Frankie's lack of muscle, saying that he hoped he wouldn't be handing the tiles down to him one at a time. Frankie laughed this off, telling the driver he'd only been working for a few weeks, but in six months he would have muscles like Charles Atlas. The driver laughed and said he didn't doubt it.

"We'll start with threes and see how it goes, eh?" the driver said, having taken up his position on the back of the lorry and pulled on a pair of protective work gloves. Frankie, with no such protection, nodded and the driver handed down the first three tiles. They were heavier than he expected and he could only just get his bare fingers around them. He placed them flat on the ground to make a pile of twelve, and then he stacked the following ones vertically against the pile. On top of that, he made another flat pile and started a second tier running along the top of the lower one. They hadn't made much progress before Frankie had to stop because of pain in his lower back. The driver resumed handing the tiles down in twos, but Frankie continued to have frequent pain breaks during which he would arch backward and stretch, to the good-natured teasing of the driver.

Finally, after half an hour's toil, they began to remove the final row of tiles. As Frankie stacked, he cursed Greg and Spud, who had descended the ladder and were heading towards the van for their lunch break. A drop of sweat fell from Frankie's nose onto the smooth surface of one of the tiles, where it quickly evaporated on the warm grey concrete.

It was twelve-fifteen when Frankie climbed into the back of the van and sat on an upturned bucket among the strewn mess. Greg and Spud occupied the front seats and neither of them looked up from their newspapers to acknowledge the arrival of their workmate. Frankie handed Spud a receipt for the tiles and the latter took it with a grunt. "Got anything to drink?" Frankie said, "I'm parched."

"You'll need plenty of water this afternoon," Spud said, "once you start carryin' them bleedin' tiles up. Best fill one of them empty pop bottles at the tap."

"Aye," Frankie said between chews of a meat-paste sandwich. He pulled one of the empty bottles from a bucket and held it up to see if there were any dregs left inside. "Wait a minute," he said suddenly, "I've got a better idea." He clamped the sandwich between his teeth and crawled towards the back doors, ignored by the other two. He rummaged around in the back of the van, unearthing three empty pop bottles from the debris of buckets, tools, and old coats. The mood of the young labourer lightened considerably as he stood the bottles in a row at the roadside. "Back in a minute," he said, and he ran off through a gap in the houses, throwing away what was left of his sandwich as he went.

The cabin was full of men on their lunch breaks when Frankie walked in. The air was thick with smoke and curses, and a good joke brought roars of laughter from one corner. Frankie made his way around the tables asking for empty bottles or helping himself to any that were 

 unattended. Most of the men ignored him, being more concerned with eating, reading newspapers, and playing cards. The mission was a success, however, for Frankie emerged from the cabin with one bottle in each hand and one under each arm.

"Seven bottles!" he said in triumph when he got back to the van. He picked up the three bottles from the roadside and somehow managed to carry all seven by keeping them pressed against his body with his arms. "There's enough here for a bottle of pop, or at least a can," he said, walking past the van.

"Just get back before one," Spud said from the open window.

"Bastard," Frankie said, remembering that he hadn't started his lunch break until twelve-fifteen. He made his way carefully through the site entrance and into the street beyond.

At a nearby newsagent's Frankie pushed down the handle with his elbow and shoved the door open with his shoulder. A bell dinged as the door gave. The shopkeeper, tall with grey slicked-back hair and spectacles perched on the end of his nose, stood behind the counter engrossed in a racing newspaper. He glanced up at Frankie, then, on seeing the colour of his face, did a double take. "Oh hello, Tonto," he said. "We don't get many of your kind in here." Frankie smiled and leaned sideways over the counter, depositing the bottles that he held in his right arm onto the flat surface. 

The shopkeeper picked up one of the bottles, and then, after sliding the spectacles up the bridge of his nose, examined the label for the stamp that would confirm that it had originally been purchased at his shop. With one hand now free, Frankie stood the remaining bottles on the counter and put his hands in his pockets. "That one's a non-runner for a start," the shopkeeper said, rotating a bottle so that Frankie could see there was no stamp on the label.

"How much do I get for a bottle?" Frankie said.

"Five new pence, son, so six bottles make thirty pence." The shopkeeper turned to the till and a loud ping rang out, followed by the sound of repeated metallic scrapes as he slid coins from the drawer. The shopkeeper slammed the till drawer shut and turned to Frankie. He dropped six five-pence pieces into the boy's hand. "There you go son, thirty new pence. What used to be six bob."

"Thanks, Mister," Frankie said turning to leave, but suddenly stopping and resuming his position at the counter. He stared down at the coins in his left hand while he reckoned up in his mind, aided by the fingers of his right. Finally, he spoke. "D'you sell loose cigarettes, Mister?" The shopkeeper shook his head.

"Sorry son. Not much demand for them really. Once you open a packet they dry out if they're left, you see." The disappointment on Frankie's face showed as he turned to leave, but the shopkeeper spoke. "What's up, son, are you gasping for a smoke?" Frankie turned and nodded. With a smile, the shopkeeper reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a packet of cigarettes. He handed one over to Frankie, who thanked him. "You're welcome," he said, returning to his studies. Frankie turned and left the shop.

Back outside Frankie raised a hand to shield his eyes from the sudden brightness. A queue of people waited at a bus stop, and among them, Frankie spotted a man with a lit cigarette in his mouth. He approached the man, and asked for a light. After performing a double-take on seeing the stranger's complexion, the man blew on the tip of his cigarette and then held it so that Frankie could draw a light from it, the chubby fingers of his fist gripped it so tightly it had flattened. Frankie puffed at the cigarette to make sure it was well lit and he took a deep drag, giving a thumbs-up and thanking the man as he exhaled.

A double-decker bus lumbered up the road toward the bus stop. Frankie pulled the coins from his pocket and took his place in the queue. As he boarded the bus, he thought of Greg and Spud back at the site, and he felt better than he had all day.